As he grins serenely and his burgundy robes billow in the fresh Himalayan wind, it is not difficult to see why scientists declared Matthieu Ricard the happiest man they had ever tested.

The monk, molecular geneticist and confidant of the Dalai Lama, is passionately setting out why meditation can alter the brain and improve people’s happiness in the same way that lifting weights puts on muscle.

‘It’s a wonderful area of research because it shows that meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree but it completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are,’ the Frenchman told AFP.

Ricard, a globe-trotting polymath who left everything behind to become a Tibetan Buddhist in a Himalayan hermitage, says anyone can be happy if they only train their brain.

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson wired up Ricard’s skull with 256 sensors at the University of Wisconsin four years ago as part of research on hundreds of advanced practitioners of meditation.

The scans showed that when meditating on compassion, Ricard’s brain produces a level of gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — ‘never reported before in the neuroscience literature’, Davidson said.

The scans also showed excessive activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex […]

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Employers are already treating their workers like their subjects. Now some of them get to collect taxes, too.

Though a lot of Americans really (really, really) hate paying taxes, most of us can at least justify it as our contribution to some greater good, whether it’s the broad range of social programs favored by progressives or a libertarian night watchman state. But what if the government instead told us, ‘We don’t want your money, but we would like to make friends with some rich guys, so just give it to them and let them have fun with it

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The Last Saturday of September-game day in Alabama, the Crimson Tide and Tigers both at home-Birmingham seemed to have all but emptied out, fans having bolted west to the big one in Tuscaloosa, or south for the rout in Auburn. I was heading north to the farmland of Cullman County. The vista along I-65 still showed scars from tornadoes-some half a mile wide-that ripped through Alabama in April, part of a storm that carved a path all the way to the Carolinas. You could still see their mark in buzz-cut swaths of hillsides, in piles of pine and scrub oak smeared together on a bluff. Along the shoulder, a few of the slender, towering high-mast poles that light the interstate at night had been snapped in half. One even made for curious disaster art, bent and curved and twisted like a giant Calder sculpture.

Founded by a utopian German émigré [8] who imagined it as ‘the garden spot of America,’ Cullman itself is a sundown town with storybook touches: early 20th-century storefronts, the yawp and clatter of a train and boxcars plodding through downtown. On the outskirts, I drove past piles of rock and rubble that flanked incomprehensibly lucky houses the […]

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In a world dogged by conflicts and wars, the key to peace and reconciliation lies in food, say chefs, small-scale producers and Slow Food campaigners at the world’s biggest food fair in Turin.

Among the thousands of stalls which line the fair with spices, fruits, wines and delicacies from 100 countries in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, springs a huge African food garden with pumpkins, berries, bananas and trees.

The plot represents the 25 countries involved in the ‘Thousand Gardens in Africa project,

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LOS ANGELES — More than 18 months after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, 40-foot tsunami and nuclear power plant woes that struck Japan starting March 11, 2011, levels of radioactive cesium 134 and cesium 137 originating from the crippled Fukushima-Daiichi plant remain elevated in some fish and seafood in nearby waters.

That suggests that radiation from the plant is still being released into the ocean, wrote Ken Buesseler, a marine of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., in a perspective article in Friday’s edition of the journal Nature.

Buesseler reviewed data on radionuclides in fish and other seafood that have been compiled by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries since March 23, 2011. Cesium levels were highest in bottom-dwelling fish caught near Fukushima prefecture, and lower in fish who live in the open ocean or closer to the surface, Buesseler reported.

He also noted that cesium levels had not declined, except ‘perhaps’ in surface-dwelling fish. Over time, cesium that accumulates in the muscle tissue of fish should decline at a loss rate of a few percent per day. From this Buesseler reasoned that ‘there must be a continued source of cesium contamination associated with the seafloor.’ One possibility could […]

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